


Sharp Edges

by thegirlwiththemouseyhair



Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-03 17:19:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8722222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirlwiththemouseyhair/pseuds/thegirlwiththemouseyhair
Summary: I hope you're okay with a treat exploring the possibility of a queer Kay, the surly, sharp-edged knight who's loyal and a Good Guy (TM) despite also being a Little Shit (TM) (a character type that I just love). I'd wanted to explore Kay not being straight and potentially being hot-tempered due to being defensive and feeling like a misfit, and your prompt inspired me to explore that idea even though Kay was not in the tag set this year. I hope you enjoy this regardless.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Roswellian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roswellian/gifts).



Everyone knew Cei was restless. He was sullen and uneasy at home, by his own father’s hearth, and even worse at his neighbours’, and was so brave in combat that he had often been chided for recklessness. 

Everyone said there was no accounting for it, except of course Cei’s father, who wouldn’t speak ill of his son, and Arthur, who admired Cei despite Cei’s bullying when they were boys and his sharpness now. Cei was quite sure his father didn’t know what the matter was. Most people didn’t, thankfully: that was why they found him so strange, so inexplicable. He suspected that Arthur, who wasn’t nearly as boyish or as gullible as he looked, knew something of Cei’s emptiness and disdain around women, and perhaps even something of the heated looks Cei had shared with some of their father’s soldiers. But Cei knew what Arthur was like. Arthur took too much pride in acting saintly to say anything untoward. Cei trusted that he was safe with his brother, or rather, his foster brother. 

Still, Cei had stopped alluding to Arthur’s likely illegitimacy once he was old enough to understand his own delicate secret. He and Arthur both had unsavoury secrets now; there wasn’t any sense in irking Arthur by teasing him, no matter how funny it had been when they were young and Cei barely understood what being a bastard meant. It had been funny regardless. In fact, it had been - or, at least, had  _ seemed _ \- worth the only two beatings Cei had ever received from his father.

But now Cei might need Arthur in a way that he never had before. He supposed that when the time came, he could count on Arthur to understand why Cei’s marrying the daughter of their father’s closest ally, as their father wished, was impossible. Let Arthur have her. He seemed to want her, and if the girl’s father couldn’t be persuaded to overlook Arthur’s parentage, then let whoever became High King on New Year’s Day take the girl off Cei’s hands. Then Cei would return to his father’s lands, thank whatever gods existed that no one in  _ his _ family would be High King and have to marry to further tribal unity or some rubbish, and bide his time until he either died by a Saxon hand or saw the end of their invasion.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you're okay with a treat exploring the possibility of a queer Kay, the surly, sharp-edged knight who's loyal and a Good Guy (TM) despite also being a Little Shit (TM) (a character type that I just love). I'd wanted to explore Kay not being straight and potentially being hot-tempered due to being defensive and feeling like a misfit, and your prompt inspired me to explore that idea even though Kay was not in the tag set this year. I hope you enjoy this regardless.


End file.
